Invitation to Die

by Barbara Cleverly

  A nervous maid responded to his knock on the door. She solemnly looked at his CID identity card, comparing the affably smiling features before her with the grim professional photograph pasted onto the card and decided that he’d do.

  “The mistress will see you now in the parlour, Superintendent. Will you step this way?” And with a swish of the ribbons on her long-out-of-fashion evening-uniform headdress, she set off down the hall of Rosemount, Briary Lane, in the village of Wilby near Leeds, halfway between the golf course and the reservoir.

  Her mistress, who had been seated in an armchair within curtain-twitching reach of the window overlooking the front garden, now arose and came unsteadily to meet him. Largely, he thought cynically, to demonstrate how feeble and thoroughly unprotected she was. Her black silk skirt and white blouse of Edwardian cut emphasised her vulnerable state. He took the thin, cold fingers she offered him by way of handshake, trying not to crush them in his bear’s paw, and murmured the usual polite formulae for greeting a respectable old dame who has, to her great personal inconvenience, allowed a policeman to intrude upon her calm existence.

  “Now then, Beattie,” he said with a growl of brusque friendliness, “this won’t take long if you answer up straight and true. My car’s parked round the corner, so as not to give your neighbours anything to gossip about. I have good manners, you see, for a policeman. I can be in it and back on my way to the Leeds nick in ten—”

  “Inspector!” she interrupted him in a firm, angry voice, stripping him of two ranks in one word. “My name is Beata, not Beattie! And to gentlemen of the police force, I am Mrs. Fox.”

  “Thank you for enlightening me. I’m Hesketh Frogmore MacFarlane. Mackie to my friends. Superintendent to you, Missis. Shall we proceed?”

  She narrowed her eyes and nodded. “If we must. But first . . .” She tugged on a bell pull, and when the maid entered with a bob, called briefly for “the tray, Maisie. The drinks tray.”

  Turning again to MacFarlane: “Six o’clock is not a social hour in this village, Superintendent. You have missed the tea I had thought of offering you when you made your initial approach and suggested five o’clock. Cook had prepared a very good barm cake. Pity.”

  The tray must have been waiting on the hall table, since it was brought in at once.

  “What may I offer you? We have sherry, scotch, spa water, lemonade or my bilberry cordial diluted with tonic water.”

  MacFarlane’s eyes ran longingly over the Red Label Johnnie Walker before he remembered his early start and exhausting journey and the convivial evening he was looking forward to with his old army mates, and his eyes flicked back to the intriguingly purple-red brew in a ship’s decanter.

  “Would that be bilberries from the moors?” he asked.

  “I picked them myself, not a quarter of a mile away. It’s last year’s harvest, of course, and at its best full flavour now. I find that half Barbados and half white sugar give the best colour. I put some down every year as I have done since I was a girl.”

  “Then that’s what I will have, thank you.”

  Jones obliged, tinkling glasses and squirting tonic. Without being asked, she served her mistress a large, rich sherry.

  MacFarlane sipped and appreciated. He waited until Mrs. Fox had taken two good sips of her sherry and then embarked on his interview.

  “Tell me about your son, Mrs. Fox. Your son, Sydney.”

  “Syd’s dying. Haven’t you heard? You’ve come the wrong way. You should have gone south to London. The hospice annex of St. Thomas’s Hospital. He turned his face to the wall two weeks ago. I’m expecting the bad news any moment.” And, suspiciously, “Are you the bearer of that bad news? Are you sure that’s not why you’re here? No? Well, my Syd’s a good son. He’s leaving me well provided for. I went down to see him—oh, a month ago to say goodbye, and he informed me of his testamentary dispositions. I am to keep this house and have a good pension for life.” She sighed. “Such as it will be for a widow who’s about to lose her one remaining son.”

  “And he served in South Africa, I understand. Did he tell you about his time down there?”

  “He wrote me a letter every week. The post was better in those days before the war, even the post coming from South Africa.”

  “Do you still have his letters?” MacFarlane tried to keep an eager edge from his tone.

  “No. That was one of his last requests. He told me to burn all his correspondence and the family photographs.”

  “What! Bit odd, that. Did you, Mrs. Fox?”

  “Half and half. I burned the letters but kept the photos. Not his right to say, I thought. There were more people in those pictures than Sydney. They were family studies. His father and two older brothers as well, and I wasn’t going to erase them from my life on a whim from Syd.” She took another fortifying sip of sherry.

  “Quite right. I’ve been trying to get hold of a picture of Sydney in his prime. Would you mind?”

  “Only if you’re prepared to come clean and tell me why you want to know what Syd looks like.”

  A few moments later and the maid was returning with the family album. She pulled out a small table and sited the ornate leather-backed book on it by her mistress’s armchair. MacFarlane pulled up a chair opposite and settled in for a surprisingly comfortable chat with the old lady. He’d done this dozens of times with his elderly aunts, and he knew which remarks produced a response.

  “So tell me, Beattie—which of these handsome lads is the eldest?”

  “That’s Joel.”

  “And this is?”

  “Henry . . .”

  The story, mostly a sad one, unrolled.

  “Then this little bubble-haired scallywag must be—Sydney.”

  “His looks didn’t last,” said the doting mother. “His hair turned from blond to brown and lost its curl. He ended up quite ordinary-looking. He’s bald now; he had quite a corporation before the disease took hold of him. He took to hiding it under sashes and gold chains when his waistcoats gave up the struggle.”

  MacFarlane looked into the dark eyes, hard as obsidian. Strewth! She must have been a bugger to please, he thought.

  “But he always had a sharp brain, our Syd. He went off a-soldiering because there was nothing else for him to do except for helping in the shop. We just had the one then. No way Syd was going to dirty his hands serving the community. And with two older brothers ahead of him, he was never going to inherit the business. Though he had a way with Joel and Henry. Could twist them round his little finger from an early age. They were devoted to their little brother. They would never have seen him go short.”

  “Was he prepared for South Africa? That dreadful business?”

  “Who was? Of course, he hadn’t expected a posting any farther away than Hull! He’d never have joined up. But there he was. Stuck with it. He made the best of it, though, and came away back home with a tidy sum he’d saved. “There’s nothing to spend your pay on, out there, Ma,” he told me. He invested it in the business. Had to, really, Joel and Henry being dead. They died together in that snow of the winter of 1901. A crash in the Hawksnest Pass, making the Christmas delivery in the truck.”

  “Did he make any lasting friends in the army?”

  “He didn’t much like the men in his unit. You can’t pick and choose in the army, but he was billeted with some real stinkers. He especially disliked his officer . . . a captain, I think. Dunne, his name was. He had it in for our Syd. Everyone noticed. Never missed a chance to do him in. But there was one who came to visit every year. A really good friend to Syd. Saved his life several times, Syd would say. ‘Uncle Herbert,’ we all called him.”

  “What was that, Beattie? Why ‘uncle’?”

  “Oh, that was what Syd’s son called him. Turn a page or two . . . here we are. There’s Syd posing at the front door, just back from the wars. Very brown, three inches t
aller and a lot thinner than when he’d left. They starved our poor boys! They were down to one biscuit a day sometimes. And here’s the girl he left behind. Grace.”

  “Pretty girl!”

  “Far too good for him. Her family came from down south. They’d been silk workers immigrating from France. Not much cash to start with, but lots of business sense. And fancy ways. I never knew what she saw in Syd. Anyway, Grace waited for him, and they were wed as soon as he came back. And that’s when it started.”

  “What started, Beattie?”

  “The boom, they called it. Syd said Grace had brought a bit of a dowry with her in a continental way, and he had his army savings. He took over. He bought up the rival shop in the village. Next year he bought three more out of the profits, and it snowballed. Everything he and Grace touched did well. Well enough to send their son to one of those private schools. I came out against sending a seven-year-old kiddie off to a school in the south. With his rough Yorkshire ways, he’d get a right kicking, I said. They just laughed. Of course, they were right. They’d employed a nanny for the little one right from the start. A London nanny who spoke proper. And his uncle Herbert had been giving him training in shooting and self-defence every summer holiday for years. Said he was preparing him for entry to Sandhurst military college.

  “But in the end it didn’t take. Waste of time! My grandson was much more interested in pursuing a university career. He’s been reading history at Cambridge . . .” Beattie’s frilled bosom swelled with grandmotherly pride, and her string of Whitby jet mourning beads stirred into a pattering applause. “He graduated last summer. And now he’s working for his doctorate, and eventually he’ll enter Parliament. Killing things and people was never going to be Digby’s way in life.”

  MacFarlane bit back a facetious riposte to that rosy view of national politics.

  She turned over a page or two and pointed. “There they are! Uncle Herbert and Digby and some creature they’d just stalked and shot up on the moors. And here’s my lovely grandson as he really is: wearing his gown and mortarboard on the front lawn of his new college four years ago.”

  “Oh, I know that ivy-shrouded doorway. That would be—?”

  “St. Jude’s Cambridge. Ah, is that the connection? Is that why you’re here? Has something happened in Cambridge?”

  MacFarlane was flummoxed. He had no idea himself why he was up here, wandering down Briary Lane with Mrs. Fox and her family album. He had no wish to alarm her with garbled stories about bodies littering Cambridge and all occasioned by a contact with Jude’s. Witnesses always liked to be proved right. They loved to say, I told you so! He’d press that button.

  “Beata, you’ve guessed my secret. Got me bang to rights! Yes. It’s all to do with Cambridge. Cambridge politics, to be exact. The state the country’s in . . .” He shook his head, despondent. “The powers that be can’t be too careful. His grandmother isn’t the only one to spot young Digby’s potential, and enquiries have to be made. In the most discreet way, of course! We are not a police state. But we are conscious of the growing danger of a certain revolutionary presence jostling for position with the pots de chambre.”

  “Reds under the beds, do you mean? Up here in Yorkshire? Never! Where do you think you are? We’ve got a golf club opposite!”

  “Um, er . . . indeed. The prophylactic powers of the golf course are underestimated, I’ve always thought.” He hurried on. “But the force does keep records, and in the case of an aspiring politician, especially one from the north—that dark, mysterious place!—questions are asked of us. If we don’t know the answers, we have to ask someone who does know. And what better authority than a granny? I wonder, may I take away with me—for instant return, of course—these two photographs from your collection? This one and that one. There, that should set a few inquisitive minds at rest.”

  Seeing him get to his feet, Beattie rang for the maid.

  “Oh, before I go—can you just confirm the year your son Sydney decided to change his surname by deed poll to . . . er, what was it?” He pretended to refer to his notes. “Here we are: Gisbourne?”

  “1903. Just before his son was born. He thought it was a smarter name for the child and for the grocery chain he was planning. He’d just bought out a store called Gisbourne the Grocer, and he thought he’d help himself to the name as well. The old Gisbourne had just died, so he wasn’t using it anymore. And it had Yorkshire connections, Sydney said. You know, Robin Hood and all that. There was a Sir Guy of Gisbourne fencing with Douglas Fairbanks in a film last year. My cousin took me to see it at the Palace Picture House in Leeds.”

  “Now I remember! Cracking film! You’re right, Beattie! Guy of Gisbourne—the hired killer out to get our Robin, wasn’t he? Well, well! Let’s keep it in the county, shall we?”

  The old lady came along with the maid to see him to the door. As he was handed his hat, MacFarlane looked at the strange pair, women from a past century playing out well-rehearsed parts. He had the unsettling feeling that, once the door had closed behind him, they would fade away and dissolve, leaving no more than a trace of mothballs in the air. He read a mute and hopeless defiance in their eyes. They knew all but could determine nothing. A woman who had lost her husband and two sons, was about to lose a third and—possibly worst of all—was about to lose her much-loved grandson to . . . what? To the sophistication of the south, to the rarefied uplands of academia, to the bear pit of politics, or to the remorseless attentions of Superintendent MacFarlane, CID?

  They must not see the pity in his eyes, he thought. He could at least spare these proud women that insult. He took his hat and with an ancient flourish swept it across his front and bowed. Without irony. They bobbed their heads in response. He straightened up, winked and said cheerfully, “Cede nullis, eh, ladies? A Yorkshire motto, and a good one. Embroider that and hang it over your beds. And thank you so much for the bilberry cordial! An excellent vintage!”

  Chapter 21

  Barnsley, Yorkshire, Thursday,

  the 22nd of May, 1924

  A hangover and a late night were not the best preparation for interviewing a man who made his living from bookmaking; MacFarlane knew that. And warning enough perhaps that the man’s nickname, according to the notes sent down, was “Ratty.” MacFarlane would read nothing into that until he’d met the man. He rather approved of rats. Survivors, they were. Intelligent scavengers and good parents. He’d studied their habits in the trenches and knew why they held such horror for most. But “bookmaking”? The profession—and that was a flattering term, rarely attached to the world of gambling—was thriving again now that the men were back home. Ratty Merriman was involved with what was technically an illegal activity, something the Betting Act of 1906 had done little to eliminate or even restrain. It was increasingly popular, and it was tolerated by the police—when necessary. MacFarlane knew that bribery was rife in most of the county forces, and so long as their activities were performed with some discretion, the bookies could thumb their noses cheerfully at the law.

  “Mm, Park Parade. This is the place. I wonder which one of these emporia is acting as the front for the ponies?” he muttered to himself as they drew up outside a recently built row of shops.

  “The one at the end on the left. Ease of access or egress.” The driver grinned. “Basilio, the barber of Milan. You can get a haircut and lose your shirt at the same time.”

  As MacFarlane laughed and asked his police driver to wait, a commissionaire strode down from the row of shops that appeared to be his patch and approached the car. He was wearing a military-style greatcoat festooned with gold cord, and he addressed the superintendent with smiling aggression.

  “Oy, you! Mister! Round the back, if you wouldn’t mind! Bad for business, police cars. And this heap’s got ‘rozzer’ written all over it.”

  MacFarlane was all amazement. “Naw! I’ll tell you what’s bad for business . . . a bag of wind got up in a p
antomime uniform. A toy soldier who goes about annoying the customers.” A left fist shot out with the speed and directness of a jackhammer, smashing into the doorman’s solar plexus. MacFarlane ignored the spluttering and the wheezing and turned to his driver. “Did you see that, Sarge? Clumsy oaf fell right onto my fist! Must be drunk! Stay where you are and fetch me if he stops breathing. I may be some time.”

  A whistle, a beckoning finger and a cheerful guffaw greeted him as he approached and sized up the barbering salon. “We’ve all wanted to do that, Mister! Or should I say, Superintendent? Ralph Merriman at your service. And watch yourself with me! I’ve got army training, too! Come on through. Rita—that’s my wife—has got the kettle on.”

  In the office behind the salon, Ratty found him a chair, cleared his desk and got down to business at once. “I should have come to you. Made contact. Years ago. But with old mates, it’s not easy to know the right things to do. Anyway, Ernest dying like that . . . He was murdered, you know. To shut him up. I think Ernie’d gone too far and threatened to go to the police. He was talking about it. Or he may have been trying to blackmail someone. I’m talking about Ernest Jessup, ex-Corporal Jessup. We were close in the South African business. Kept in contact after we got back to Blighty. He was doing well for himself. The last time I saw him, which was in London, he told me he’d gotten a promotion at the firm—he was an accountant in civvy street—and had been given a really top-notch client to work on. With assistance, of course—it was a sort of training spell for Ernest. He was out to make an impression, you can imagine, and he was always careful anyway. He saw something he didn’t much care for in the new account. Things didn’t add up.”

  “And you can’t be doing with that in accountancy,” offered MacFarlane.